What is meta-externalads?
meta-externalads is a web crawler operated by Meta that scans websites to gather information about content that may be shared or advertised on Facebook's platform. The bot helps Meta understand external web content, optimize ad delivery, and manage advertisements across their social media properties. You can set up Agent Analytics to see when meta-externalads visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Meta |
| Source | Official Website |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | September 14, 2026 |
Do you operate this agent? Contact us to suggest an update.
Category
Expected Behavior
meta-externalads's traffic pattern depends on the intelligence being collected. It may revisit specific pages on a schedule, crawl broader sections of your site, or appear only when information is requested. Its request scope and frequency reflect the underlying objective.
meta-externalads's User Agent
| User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_3_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/22D72 Safari/604.1 [FBAN/FBIOS;FBAV/577.1.0.69.74;FBBV/1058113930;FBDV/iPhone17,3;FBMD/iPhone;FBSN/iOS;FBSV/18.3.1;FBSS/3;FBID/phone;FBLC/en_US;FBOP/5;FBRV/0;IABMV/1] meta-externalads/1.1 |
How To Block meta-externalads With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block meta-externalads from accessing your website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all intelligence gatherers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: meta-externalads # https://knownagents.com/agents/meta-externalads
Disallow: /Insights for meta-externalads
As of September 14, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
6% of top websites block meta-externalads in their robots.txts.
Overall Intelligence Gatherer Traffic
3.3% of all web traffic came from intelligence gatherers.
Top Visited Website Categories
The types of websites most frequently visited by meta-externalads.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block meta-externalads?
Confirm meta-externalads's purpose before blocking it. Intelligence gatherers may collect competitive research, measure advertisements, or evaluate pages for brand safety. Weigh any benefit against sharing business or page-level data with its operator or clients. For context, 6% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for meta-externalads.
Does meta-externalads Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. meta-externalads is expected to follow robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule is the appropriate first step. Automatic Robots.txt can add and maintain that rule, while Agent Analytics lets you verify whether meta-externalads respects it.
Does meta-externalads Access Private Content?
No special access. meta-externalads can read publicly available pages but cannot bypass authentication. Assume anything you publish openly may be collected.
How Can I Tell if meta-externalads Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks visits from meta-externalads and every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper, then authenticates each visit using meta-externalads's published verification method. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "meta-externalads". Traffic may range from repeated requests to the same pages to broader crawls or one-off fetches. A matching log entry alone is not proof because any bot can claim to be meta-externalads.
Why Is meta-externalads Visiting My Website?
Meta or one of its clients may be gathering competitive intelligence, measuring advertisements, or evaluating content for brand safety. The pages requested reflect the underlying objective.